Peter P. Pramstaller is the founding director and head of the Institute for Biomedicine. As clinical neurologist, biomedical researcher and manager, he had the opportunity and privilege over the last 20 years to oversee and coordinate large, multilevel cross-disciplinary research projects, and to network with the international clinical-scientific community and industry.
Peter's primary research focus is the molecular genetics of movement disorders, with a special focus on common age-related neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD). After his return from the National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square (1993-1995) he started a large scale neuroepidemiology project on PD and related disorders (NEPT-Study) in South Tyrol (Northern Italy), applying a combination of epidemiology and pedigree-based genetics. Strengthened by the success of these familial studies, in 2002 he started the “GenNova Health Care Program,” an extensive, two-stage survey aimed at characterizing the genetic epidemiology of Mendelian and complex diseases in South Tyrolean population isolates (MICROS-Study). In 2004 GenNova became the Institute of Genetic Medicine, focusing its studies on genetic-epidemiological analyses among the South Tyrolean population isolates. In 2009 the institute grew into today’s Institute for Biomedicine, which in 2011 launched the CHRIS-Study (Cooperative Health Research In South Tyrol), a large prospective population cohort study, focused on understanding how the interaction between factors such as genomic, metabolomic and environmental variation contributes to human health and disease.